crystal meth

In honor of one recently fallen, may you have found the peace you searched for in life.

Twitch, twitch again.Twitch, twitch again.Fumbled up the crack back, didn’t do it right,left loose diamonds pooled in starlight.Chewing on white whales of smoke,dense enough to consume morals and hope.There’s no platitudes to offer,if you’ve been inhaling at the holy altar,just bow your head low for new atonement,merciful gods appear if you stay to own it..Twitch, twitch again.Twitch, twitch again.Ceaseless movement all around,darkness clutters so shapely where beasts abound,nightmare creatures from shadows are made,do what you can though you can’t be saved.There are monster deeper then mind or skin,you called them forth hoping to let them in.Twitch, twitch again.Twitch, twitch again.Begging for slumber at the end of 10-days,get along now sanity we’re deep in this haze.A misbegotten attempt at revival,turned the mysteries of the past into present survival.Let lessons be taught in the way that they are.Sick and gasping looking for the end not so far.Twitch, twitch again.Twitch, twitch again.Never again, he said.never again….

So this is where it’s all supposed to start. A basic outline, an imagining of sorts where I’m supposed to explore all the small little fucking spider webbed fragments of memories that are housed in the jumbled attic of my mind. What a blissfully wonderful, simple, and ridiculously overwhelming challenge.

I’d so dearly love to string everything together….which is clearly why I’m avoiding even beginning to think about a specific story to start the unfolding thereof.

So where to begin….

That dumb bitch had been pissed off at her boyfriend. It had started when we were playing that endless methed out game of Uno in the trailer across from Morgan’s. I don’t even know what had started her off. I think I assumed that I had something to do with it. I know I wasn’t wearing shoes. We had finally succeeded in getting Morgan’s poor boyfriend with his braces to start smoking with us. Poor bastard was just as far gone as I was and then some. I felt bad for him in the way I would a lost little puppy. Envious of his huge pupils. I loved the way eyes began to look when the black started to eat its way through the color. It was the end of clean thoughts, it was the end of humanity. It was like being carried away into the security of knowing that you weren’t there anymore. There was a peaceful fascination and raging wildness in it. I would lose myself in my own any time I caught sight of them in the mirror. Sickly enormous puddles of oily depths that offered nothing and dragged me into a world of absolute freedom where I could indulge the most whimsical or craven whim simply to sate an instant desire.

Why we jumped in her car or where we were headed I don’t know. Somewhere out of town. I was at the tail end of still owing the woman I had been babysitting for money after that horrible tear through town with everything she had strapped to my ankle. Like always after I had been awake for days things were snapping into blurs of disconnected focus without any attachment.

It didn’t used to be like that. When I had first started hitting ye ol’ crystal I could hold my shit together like a champion swimmer sucking oxygen before the final turn. Sleep deprivation was something that happened – par for the course my friend. We were tweakers and it was important that you were able to get used to your mind function sufficiently to continue funneling the ever so necessary funds to procure the ever so necessary chemicals to continue fueling the body. Otherwise you would stop moving….and that would mean going to sleep, which meant confronting the real world and it’s sad and pathetic real speed. With all the sad, worried, angry, threatening, concerned faces of those who care about you trying to figure out what to do next. Or worse, not trying to do anything. Then there would come the process of looking for all the things that you hadn’t realized you’d lost, spent, broken, misplaced, destroyed, sold, overdrawn, made promises about, lied about, etc….wreckage, wreckage, wreckage.

No, sleep deprivation wasn’t such a bad thing, as long as you could hold your shit together mentally enough to keep the fun going. Which I did wonderfully well for the first bit. Everyone else seemed to enjoy pushing it to a couple days. Say 48-72hrs.

Fucking pathetic. I was doing that on willpower when I was 10. Though when I got curious after my climbing coach’s story about caffeine pills and ate 32 of them at once when I was 12 and put myself in the ER it should have been a pretty significant warning sign that I wasn’t too worried about stimulants if they were going to be able to get me where I thought it was I wanted to go.

A portion of the memoir thingamajig I’m working on…think Hunter S. Thompson meets the Tasmanian Devil on acid and they go on a road trip…I have no idea how bum alive….
Me at 17…

The first time I had ever warn (my Santa Hat) it off season was in 9th grade….I didn’t want to fall into any of the socially nebulous categories that everyone knows of in high school. I was a rock climber, I was smart, I was weird, and I wanted to do drugs. A Santa Claus hat during the end of Summer into the Fall seemed lie a sufficiently bizarre calling card to elicit the kind of attention that I was hoping to draw.

Turns out I was right, and years later, when I wanted to recall some memory from those individuals who remembered my reputation for dropping acid before school and freaking out in the commons, getting the entire science glass tanked on ethyl chloride while the teacher gave a presentation, robbing the gym locker room, getting suspended and expelled for very mysterious reasons and then disappearing for a year and a half – all I had to do was put it back on. It became my calling card, my cape, and my identity. If I needed to become the villainous madman ready to do anything at any cost – burn the world to the ground for just one more $20 – let’s bring in Santa! It was stupid and youthful….but I thought I looked fucking good.

Realistically, I was a skeleton. Nearing vaporization. At one point I0 was standing 6’2” tall and weighing in at a staggeringly huge 135lbs. of skin and bones. I’m pretty sure if you looked close enough you could see the molasses my thickening blood had morphed into trying desperately to move beneath the paper disguising itself as my outer layers. The hollowed out chunks in what was my skull were no longer recognizable as anything describable as attractive windows to a soul – just aching cut outs to coals of frustration, mindless chattering banter between myself and the seas of demons that I was tormented by constantly by my own actions which invited them in to travel between my buzzing ears. There’s a tattoo that is perched forever on my left shoulder these days. It started during the final days of the longest spin I ever got spun on. It highlights the image of me face in all its weirdly grotesque glory going into the 300+ hour awake mark.

At that point there’s nothing real left in the world. The fabric of existence has been ripped to pieces, and resewn by crystalline fingers into a tapestry of madness that drifts between the cosmos. Ethereal, haunting, overwhelming when it chooses to present a new scene for the viewer to be engulfed in with neither option nor control over their role to play. One moment they may be a super star drug tyrant overseeing the peasant users around them – fools to touch such tools as these that they cannot hope to understand…..the next, huddled underneath the glovebox with a permanent marker jotting down the next sequence of license plate numbers and their related car descriptions (particular attention to be noted to the gold Volvo which is always third in line at each intersection) which form the state wide task force that has been deployed to hunt you down after the systematically arrest each of your friends and turn them against you.

The tattoo shows the lewd, cheek partially raised, only one sided grin that became a permanent fixture on my face for several weeks. There was something that was both somewhat charming – think everyone’s favorite super villain from Batman – and terribly off putting. There was no rhyme or reason to why I was “smiling”. Nothing phased me, or it. The situations that were plaguing my now nearly homeless existence; the impending and quickly approaching doom that I seemed determined to drive myself to by ingesting enormous quantities of ice all at once – to that extend that even when the dealers or our funds would dry up for a day or two, I could ride the high for the intervening time without coming down even a touch. Even when I was passed along right after the initial outline was laid in by the artist (also a middle man to my dealer who was trying to knock me out with sleeping pills unsuccessfully to get me out of my psychosis since I was freaking people out) to a black man who worked at Starbucks with less polite sexual intentions towards my nubile young body….couldn’t let the smile waver.

I really can’t even remember that much of what happened, nor if something did. Though I have to assume since I’d been awake for well over the 450+ hour mark by the time I got to the basement with its strange purple feathery covered couch and mood lighting and all I had eyes for was the pipe – who knows what I would have been willing to do. I can recall dancing for him with no shirt on. Many, many, many plants upstairs. Lining the kitchen counters. And he had a fascination, bordering on obsession, with ensuring that I only used the blue part of the lighter flame to hit the pipe. It had something to do with it being the neutral part – but it doesn’t make sense to me in retrospect. Didn’t matter then, I just know he had almost a ball of some truly superb crystal, and even typing about it now I can feel my heart accelerating and my eyes start to cross dreamily.

How oddly sick isn’t it? In a recollection of potentially being raped over drugs by someone I didn’t know in their basement – where I believe I can account for being locked for nearly 3-days since I didn’t make it to detox until the 28th day of being awake, which I went to almost directly from there. But that aside – despite the fact of what is happening during the recollection – it actually inspires a desire in me to go get high on the exact same substance precipitated the event in the first place.

Being an addict sucks, it really does. You want the things that kill you worse than the things that save you. It’s like the survival instinct we’re supposed to be born with was installed backwards and then given some extra juice.

“We fucked up the orientation Ted, may as well make it run fast and aggressive eh?”
Love to hear your thoughts!